Restoring rural America

Jefferson questioned the commitment of merchants and bankers to the nation; their commitments to profit would find them supporting whoever (and whatever nation) could guarantee their wealth. Yeomen had an inescapable commitment to their own land. And that commitment would create a virtuous cycle of hard, honest work to improve the land, and with it the citizenry. - John Ragosta, historian at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello

In the eyes and hearts of our founders, America’s rural spirit was the spirit of our free nation. It was the hard-working, self-sufficient, community-based set of habits and attitudes that would allow us to resist the corruption of the financiers who would seek to make us serfs working for their profit. While our urbanization was largely inevitable, the near abandonment of rural America in recent decades has been unnecessary and unfortunate. Laborism will restore that heritage and make it available to all Americans. This requires two broad initiatives: 1) revitalizing rural towns; and 2) restoring family farms and protecting them from banks and agribusiness corporations.

Revitalizing rural towns

America has continued to abandon rural areas at the same time that the reasons for abandoning them have become obsolete. In the first part of the 20^th century, cities were where the action was. If you wanted entertainment, big city theaters, sports venues, music bars, comedy clubs and the like, cities were the thing. In World War I parents worried “how are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?” If you wanted a high-paying job, cities had them. But then the technology era came along. Today, on any given evening a family in Cozad, Nebraska, the Alfalfa Capital of the World, is probably doing the same things as a family in New York, LA or Chicago. You can listen to the latest music, watch the latest movies, see comedy club performances or video of plays, see all the sports you want, and so on anywhere. For many high-paying jobs, you can work from anywhere, at least in principle. You can buy products from around the world and have them delivered to your door. Yes, if you really want to spend your time in a bar where you are pressed in by people on all sides and can’t hear the person next to you talk as you drink your $12 beer, then you still probably need to be in Manhattan, but most of us most of the time don’t especially want to do that.

On the other hand, there are things you can do in rural towns that you can’t do in cities. You can see the stars and hear the birds. You can breathe clean air if you are not near a feed lot. You can eat food picked 10 minutes ago. You can go places without being stuck in traffic with a bunch of incompetent maniacs. Your kids can play outside and be independent. You may not meet as many people, but you can actually get to know the ones you meet.

One feature of rural life is badly underappreciated in America – the ability to have fresh, unique food. In Italy, people are very interested in, and justly proud of, their food. They don’t eat flavor- saver tomatoes that taste like pink-dyed cardboard. They are fussy about their cornmeal. They take pride in growing heritage vegetables that may not keep or ship well but that are loaded with flavor. (I get the seeds for my backyard garden from an Italian company.) Little hole-in-wall restaurants have a simple signature dish that is as good as anything you can get from a Michelin star restaurant. Italy has developed a major agritourism¹ business, where people from all over Europe come to stay on farms or in rural towns to eat the fresh local food and drink the local wines. America can and should do the same thing. Terravox winery in Missouri has revived American native wine grapes that had been the foundation of a Missouri winery boom that was gaining world respect before Prohibition came and the vines were torn out. In other parts of the country we can do beer. Pal’s Brewing Company in North Platte, Nebraska has great house-brewed beer and pizza and other food, as good as you can get anywhere, and sensibly priced. Phat Fish brewing in Dickinson North Dakota is great, too. I would rather eat in Harry’s Cafe in Pittsburg, Kansas than in any of the places in my large suburb. When we drive out west, we plan our schedule to be able to visit the Crow Bar in Thermopolis for their particularly good smoothies and flatbread.

I have stopped buying store bread and bake all of ours using great-tasting heritage whole wheat flour from a mill in Dripping Springs, Texas. That wheat is never exposed to nerve-killing pesticides or carcinogenic herbicides or other chemicals that act as female hormones in growing boys and girls. I use delicious ancient-grain whole wheat berries from the same mill instead of bland white rice (takes a little longer to cook, but you can make it ahead if that’s an issue). I get blue corn meal from another local mill for our tacos and Native American beans from a native farm in Arizona. There are good local cheese makers in towns across America. Distillers like Far North Spirits in Hallock, Minnesota, make unique products from local grain that aren’t quite like anything from anywhere else. Rushford, Minnesota, has great lefse. Real food from real places is a wonderful thing, and if you make a trip with the thought of buying some you can have a lot of fun and save the shipping costs.

Rural universities have the advantage that they have students to patronize their restaurants during the school year, and those university towns are an underappreciated destination in summer when the students are gone. When we are driving to the northeast we arrange our route and timing to be able to stop at the Clemson University student center to get the ice cream and blue cheese from the university dairy, and there are several good restaurants in town. Kline’s Dairy Bar in Harrisonburg, Virginia, by JMU also rates a stop.² There’s at least one great place in Valparaiso, Indiana. I’m sure alumni from every rural university could cite similar examples.

With a little effort and an Italian attitude, rural towns across America could become great food centers both for the locals and for tourists from our cities and suburbs. As destination towns they could then more easily support local artists and artisans, shop owners and B&B owners, grocery stores and mills. Local musicians could play in the brewhouses and have a chance to start building a fan base. Towns featuring the slower, more thoughtful lifestyle will be able to feature other things that have been lost in the urban and suburban bustle. For example, unless you are just in it for the label, would you rather have a dress made specifically for you by a small-town seamstress with a real sense of creative style, or a crazy expensive dress sewn in Bangladesh and designed by a person who not only isn’t a woman, but doesn’t even find women attractive?

As tourists visit and enjoy themselves, some will be attracted by the idea of getting a remote-work office job and living there, spending their salaries locally. Not only can rural towns now access most of the big city entertainments electronically, they offer others that the cities don’t. In towns, Friday night football and little league baseball are real things where people get together and enjoy themselves. Would you rather grab so-so coffee at Starbucks or have good social coffee with the folks in the Honey Bee Donut Shop in Seabrook, NH, or with the old storytellers at the bank in Andrews, Texas? Laborist rural policy will provide knowledge and training, interest free starter money, and other resources, including people if appropriate,³ to help get all this going.

While laborism does not seek to pick winners, it does support small businesses and farmers who are seeking to supply the free market with things that working people actually need and want. We would require loan recipients to have real training in business and to have a business plan that addresses how they will find enough customers, how they will make a profit in the face of competition, how they will get past bumps in the road, and so on, so that we don’t end up loaning lots of money to people in every town in America all at once to chase the same urban tourists, but we will clear needless obstacles to success. We will invest in free infrastructure that makes it as easy as possible for rural businesses to connect with potential customers. We will make it as easy as possible to find workers. We will let individual initiative and creativity figure out what people naturally want and how to supply it, but we will then make it as easy as possible for working people to supply those wants successfully.

Under laborist child and education policy, every small-town school will be a great school and the children who go there will be able to compete with kids from anywhere. We will go back to an era of pride in our schools. Our current Texas governor, who hates public schools, doesn’t realize that in many rural towns across Texas the schools are still the center of life and are the thing that gives the town its identity. Laborism will honor those towns and protect and restore the beating heart that is their schools.

America’s more rural areas and small towns are also in a position to be in the forefront of the green revolution, for the benefit of their residents. Again, laborism will let the market lead rather than picking winners, but we have already seen consumer demands that either aren’t being met or are being met by imports from China. We will create skilled job opportunities for people manufacturing, installing and maintaining American-made solar and wind electric generation to replace the oil heat of less-dense areas, helping homeowners to have stable energy costs, be independent, and get rid of those troublesome rusting oil tanks. We will work with companies to manufacture the new generation of advanced heat pumps in rural areas rather than in China, and provide jobs for skilled installers.⁴ We will work with companies to produce high-efficiency wood stoves⁵ in rural areas that rural and suburban residents in the north can use for those coldest days, and support the training of skilled chimney technicians to support the safe use of those stoves. We will create skilled jobs building new, green housing with attractive American-made wood, tile, and new-generation linoleum⁶ floors and efficient insulation, all manufactured in more rural areas, and more jobs retrofitting old housing. The market is already asking for these things, but the financier economy does not supply them effectively, and particularly not with local factories and labor.

America needs to make these changes. We can either let the financier market cause all the products to come from China and the untrained workers to come from foreign countries, or we can adopt a laborist approach to create the new products in decentralized locations using skilled American workers. American cities grew up around power sources, mainly coal and rivers, and transportation, mainly rivers, great lakes and oceans. Now we can get power from wind and sunlight. We can transport goods by highway and, with investment in infrastructure, by improved rail systems. We can put a manufacturing plant anywhere we have a reliable source of workers. Laborism will correct the market failures that keep us from distributing manufacturing instead of keeping it in cities or exporting it to other countries.

We will encourage and help family farms with the policies discussed below. Prosperous family farmers will once again form a base for prosperous rural towns.

We will make the infrastructure investments discussed above to allow small businesses in any town to serve America affordably, and to enable employees of large corporations to live and spend their pay in small-town America in that diner with great coffee and pie. We will use extension resources to help small town businesses to survive rather than falling prey to Walmart.

We will make it easier for local talent – musicians, artists, writers – to reach a national audience by breaking up the near-monopolies on access that the Big Tech and concentrated media companies have achieved. If you have watched much television or listened to much music on the radio recently you know that America’s best writers, musicians, and artists are not getting access, while untalented drones with the right connections are. We will work to fix that. America became a music powerhouse largely with low-income rural musicians. We should restore access for that talent base, and artists who do not operate in Greenwich Village should be able to reach a national audience of people who know what they like, as well as local agritourists who are happy to find their works in a local gallery.⁷

1. https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/talking-agritourism-university-minnesota

2. I even have a mnemonic for the exit, the bad slayer saying “24-7, B”.

3. See the discussion in an earlier post about helping good people to get fresh starts in life, as well as the Civilian Conservation Corps style guaranteed employment for towns that need temporary labor to get set-up projects done.

4. Heat pumps are good technology, but really good installers can make them even cheaper and more efficient.

5. Unlike old-fashioned fireplaces, these stoves put out a lot of heat from a little wood, and can commonly be operated on the wood that one generally ends up with from a suburban lot between falling branches and the occasional tree removal, as we did in Wheaton. Our stove was a major heat source in Chicago winters and we never bought wood.

6. Linoleum is made from natural, renewable materials, does not emit toxins, and lasts for decades, while it is easier on your feet than tile. That makes attractive new-generation linoleum a good green American flooring.

7. We were living in Europe when the Soviet Union broke up and Russian artists, who formerly made a living making propaganda posters, drifted into western Europe looking for new work. They were extremely talented and you could get artwork that was better than most of what you see in museums for very reasonable prices. America has talent, too, but Etsy is not an adequate tool for matching artists with art lovers. Plus, art means more if you can associate it with a place and a person.